Games

Beamdog have announced that Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition will be released on PC, iPad and Mac on 18 September this year, with an Android version to follow a few weeks or months later. They have also given more details about what the remake will consist of. As well as being made compatible with modern operating systems and graphics resolutions, the game's user interface has been updated, with many of the improvements from Baldur's Gate II ported back to the original game. The cut scenes have been re-rendered and new cut scenes added. There are three new recruitable characters: a Calishite monk, a half-elf wild mage and an half-orc blackguard. There's also a whole new quest, in which you create six new characters and take on a formidable challenge extending across multiple levels of a dungeon. The game features the original music and voices, but also some new music and voice work. The game's expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast , has also been integrated into th...

A trailer has been released for the third movie based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. You may gaze upon it below, but I take absolutely no responsibility for anyone smashing their screens in horror at its quality: The first film, simply entitled Dungeons and Dragons , was an famously rubbish, medium-budget movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. The sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God , was released in 2005 and was a near-zero budget movie starring absolutely no-one you've ever heard of. Whilst the first film was awful, it did have some basic watchability (due to the excellent 'down a pint every time Jeremy Irons either overacts or looks like part of his soul has died due to the dialogue' drinking game). The sequel was fifty times worse. If the trailer is accurate, the third will continue this decline in quality to hitherto unsuspected depths. If you want to watch a decent D&D-based movie, I instead unreservedly recommend The Ga...

The first information about the rebirth of the Baldur's Gate franchise has been released . As anticipated, the project is an ' Enhanced Edition ' of the existing BioWare games ( Baldur's Gate , Tales of the Sword Coast , Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal ) which will launch later in the summer. The first release will be Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition , which will include the original game and its expansion with enhanced and improved artwork, native high-resolution support and reworked music and voice-overs. There will also be some 'new content' provided by the original writers and creators of the game. Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition , which will include the Throne of Bhaal expansion, will be released at a later date. This is generous, since whilst Tales of the Sword Coast was a fairly minor expansion to the original game (with a couple of dungeons and a few new monsters and magic items), Throne of Bhaal was massive in size,...

An enigmatic website indicates that the veteren Baldur's Gate fantasy RPG series is set to make a comeback. Some digging by EuroGamer confirms that a new development company, Beamdog, is working on the project. What 'the project' might be remains unclear, with level-headed fans suggesting it may just be a high-definition re-release of the existing games to work better with modern-day computers rather than a full sequel (which, given the definitive way the original series ended, would be redundant anyway). More information is expected soon. The original Baldur's Gate series was developed by BioWare and Black Isle (now Obsidian) and comprises Baldur's Gate (1998) and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), along with their respective expansions, Tales of the Sword Coast (1999) and Throne of Bhaal (2001). Set in the Forgotten Realms and using the D&D 2nd Edition rules, the games chart the player character's rise from an anonymous orphan to a hero (or v...

Wizards of the Coast have confirmed that a 5th Edition of the popular Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game is in development. No release date has been set, but the game will have a lengthy development period in which fan feedback will be welcomed. The 4th Edition of the game was released in 2008, itself only five years after the previous version of the game (3.5E, a revision of the 3rd Edition originally released in 2000), so this is a fast turn-around for a game that spent almost a dozen years between the first two editions, and almost the same between the second and third. Normally fans would be up in arms over this, accusing Wizards of the Coast and their parent company, Hasbro, of trying to fleece them. However, a grim resignation seems to have met the news. 4th Edition, to put it mildly, was not a universally-acclaimed success. Previous editions of the game had built upon what had come before: 2nd Edition was a streamlined version of 1st Edition, with new rules brought in to cl...